Borderland

With Otho’s absence and silence, the uneasiness and the fears which he seemed to bring with him, like so many invisible but potent attendants, gradually died away and were lulled into serenity. The great house was closed. The Thorsgarth shooting was let, so Eleanor heard. She never went near the place, and heard nothing of it all. Her own life was sweet to her just now, and full of hope. The most beautiful season of the year floated by like an ideal, a dream of peace and of calm, yet ample life.

It would be almost impossible to imagine anything more beautiful than the aspect of Teesdale—especially of that portion of Teesdale—in the months of September and October—when they are fine and seasonable that is, and bring such skies, such winds, and such suns as are due, in these two most gorgeous months of the year.

In this particular season they were all that could be desired, and our lovers—for lovers they were, though no explicit word of love had ever passed between them—enjoyed their glory to their heart’s content. Eleanor was satisfied that Michael did not speak to her; the spell of the present time was so delicious that she would not have had it broken. She had forgotten outside troubles and difficulties; she only felt that all was well, and that a happiness awaited her in the future, so great that she could well afford to wait for it.

September sighed itself out in golden glory, leaving a luxury of ripening tints on every tree, filling the tangled hedges with many-coloured flames of dying weeds; for, as every one knows who lives in the country, the smaller plants that grow in the ditches and near to the ground—the wild geranium, the smaller hemlock, or that plant which is akin to it, the rose-bushes, the hawthorn, and wild guelder rose—these are the things that ‘turn’ first, these the objects on which autumn first places her crimson finger; and then, when she has embellished the hedges, and is pleased with the result of her handiwork, she becomes bolder, mounts higher, attacks the trees—the oak and the beech first, the sycamore and the ash following in their turn. Then it is that the river gains his stronger voice, and rushes along, ever more tumultuously. Then it is that o’ nights the air is keen, and that at that hour which has said good-bye to afternoon, and is not yet evening, there is a strange, metallic, lambent light in the sky, a light which seems also almost to crackle and sparkle in the very atmosphere, a magic, unearthly light, which has its charms for those who love to study nature in her more obscure phases.

It was on a glorious, crisp afternoon, a little beyond the middle of October, that Eleanor returned to the Dower House, after driving about a bevy of little Johnsons the whole afternoon. She dressed herself then, and went to dine and spend the evening at the old doctor’s house. After dinner Michael came in. He seemed lately to have enjoyed an unusual quantity of leisure in the evening hours. The talk turned to books; amongst other books to a book of poetry, some passage in which was disputed. Eleanor said that she had the book, and would go across to her house and fetch it. Upon this Michael announced that he should convey her across the square, and had gone as far as the door of the doctor’s house with her, when his old friend, who was in his library, called to him, hearing his step.

‘Go to him,’ said Eleanor. ‘I will fetch the book, and return to you.’ And she walked quickly across the square to her own door.

Arrived there, she found a woman’s figure standing, in an uncertain attitude, near it. Something—a nameless chill, an unspeakable dread, took possession of her. She did not speak, but paused, looking at the figure, her mind disturbed with vague recollections of Otho’s last visit.

‘Miss Askam!’ said the loiterer, in an uncertain voice.

‘Yes; who is it?’

‘It is I—Ada. I wanted to speak to you.’

‘Come in with me, then,’ she replied, but felt all the time that she was inviting some great terror and woe to enter her house.

She opened the door, and led Ada into the drawing-room, turned up the light, and looked at her; and as she looked, the words were frozen upon her lips at the aspect of the figure before her. Had not the voice said, ‘It is I—Ada,’ she would scarcely have recognised this countenance. Ada wore a large, thick, woollen shawl, falling loosely about her; and a small hat, from under which showed a face which had aged by twenty years, and which was not only aged, but seamed, furrowed, worn with lines of what must have been mortal anguish, seeing that every one of them had been stamped in less than five short months. The pretty, delicate, meaningless face was clean gone: in its stead there was a mask, betraying a mind devoured by misery; eyes which looked at once hard and frightened, hunted and yet defiant—the eyes of an animal at bay; a countenance to fill the most indifferent beholder with horror.

Struck literally speechless, Eleanor stood, her hand on the table, and stared at the figure with wide open eyes, while she felt cold and terror seize every limb. What did this apparition want with her or hers? A sickly dread, a kind of dim first suspicion of the meaning of it all crept into her heart.

‘Miss Askam,’ said this spectre of Ada Dixon, in a low and husky voice, ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘Yes,’ almost gasped the other.

‘I’m come to you, since it was no use writing to your brother. Where is he?’

The tongue of Eleanor at first clave to the roof of her mouth; at last, in a hoarse voice, she asked—

‘What have you to do with my brother?’

With a swift motion, Ada unfastened the pin at her throat; her shawl slid from her shoulders to the ground, and she confronted Eleanor.

Trembling overpowered the latter. Speech was at first denied her. She could stand no more, but crouched upon a chair, and gasped out—

‘Oh, horrible, horrible!’

Suddenly a wild gleam of hope crossed her mind. Why was she assuming the very worst to have happened? By what right did she condemn not only Otho, but Ada? She sprang up again, went close to the girl, and almost whispered—

‘Did he not marry you?’

‘Marry me!’ repeated Ada, in a fearful voice of bitterness, scorn, and despair. ‘Nay, he only swore he would, again and again.’

‘And—and——’ she shivered still. ‘And when was this?’

‘It was in March,’ replied Ada, with stony composure. ‘When I was staying in Wensleydale, and he was in Friarsdale, and he met me every day, and said he’d never cared for anybody else. I’ve written to him—a hundred letters. He has never answered one. I thought he was at home now; I heard so. I came to tell him he must—to shame him, if I couldn’t persuade him; and now ... he’s not here. No one knows ... where he is.’

With an hysterical sob she sank together in the corner of a couch.

‘In March,’ Eleanor was repeating to herself, with mechanical calm, and clenching her hands, to keep herself still. ‘March—and this is October. There is yet time.’

That was all she could think of at the moment. There was no time, no possibility for anything else. Her brain felt wound up to this emergency, and to nothing more. She walked up to Ada, and touched her.

‘Your parents—what do they know?’

‘Nothing,’ said Ada, in a dull, colourless monotone. ‘Mother is away, or I dare not have come home. Father is away for the night. He’ll be back to-morrow: he will find out ... he will turn me out of doors. Oh, Miss Askam, save me, save me, save me!’

‘Hush!’ said Eleanor, quietly. ‘Let me think. Some one must have known—the people you were staying with—your aunt?’

‘She would keep me no longer. I put her off by telling her that he was coming down there to marry me—that he’d sent me there to wait for him. I said it all depended on her keeping silence; that was why she let me stay so long.’

‘At what time will your father be back?’

‘At eleven to-morrow morning, they said.’

‘You will go home now, and stay there all night. At nine o’clock to-morrow morning come to me. I shall have had time to make arrangements then. I will see your father. I do not think he will turn you out of doors. If he does, you shall come here. I will send for—my brother. I think I can make him come. I do not wish to seem harsh to you, but you must go home now, that I may have time to arrange things. You will go to your room at once, when you get home. You understand—you can say you are tired. Try not to be frightened,’ she added, bending over Ada, who was crouched in an attitude of blank despair; ‘because I can shelter you, and I will do so, as God is above us. I promise you this. Now go.’

Slowly Ada rose. Eleanor felt afraid lest she should break down before she had left the house. But she did not. She submitted to have her shawl pinned on again, and with the same look of utter, vacant despair, walked away.

‘Either it will turn her brain or kill her,’ Eleanor felt, as the girl departed, and she sat down at the table, and rested her head on her hands, and tried to put away the recollection of the awful figure she had seen, and to reflect upon what must be done. But she scarcely had sufficient power yet, over her emotion, to be able to reflect. She could only remember, and shudder, and feel horrified, while all kinds of wild speculations darted through her mind, as to the effect the event would have upon this person, and that person; and, above all, she wondered how it was that it had never for one moment occurred to any of them that when Ada was in Wensleydale, and Otho in Friarsdale, they might easily have met. In fact, she could think of nothing but of the thing itself, and the crushing, the overwhelming horror of it, except that every now and then a thought crossed her mind that something must be done at once, and that there was no one but herself to do it; which thought reduced her to complete powerlessness.

While she sat in this chaos of thought and emotion she heard a knock at the door. She said nothing; she had forgotten all about the little things that one remembers at ordinary times, and after a moment, while she still sat, unheeding, it was gently opened, and Michael Langstroth looked in.

‘I have been sent to fetch you,’ he had begun, and then he came to a dead stop, as he saw and comprehended her strange attitude; and when, at his voice, she raised her head and looked at him, he beheld her face, and knew that since she had quitted them, a quarter of an hour ago, something terrible had happened to her. And he knew that moment—he did not in so many words state it to himself, but he knew it—that it was to him she would appeal for help. He was glad of that, but he was sorry that he had let the days go by in a dream, and had not given her the right to come to him, without thought and without question.

Eleanor, as she looked at him, felt at first a little bewildered. So overwhelmed was she with what had passed, that it was a moment or two before she actually realised who he was.

‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ says the Psalmist, ‘from whence cometh my help.’ And, in a certain degree, it was so with her. A voice supreme and unerring spoke to her; all her nature, every fibre seemed to bow to an overwhelming intuition which directed her towards the man who stood before her, looking so earnestly down upon her. She loved him, and that with a love which had grown into a great passion, and an absorbing one. But it was something different—something deeper and higher than even this great love which impelled her action now;—instinct, some might call it, and others say that she had naturally a gift for reading character correctly, and for discerning which persons were, and which were not to be relied upon. She herself would have said that God inspired her. She sat motionless for a moment, bending to this inner voice which spoke to her, acknowledging what her belief told her was the providential arrival of the one person whom she would most implicitly trust—and fighting down the unwillingness—natural and good in itself, but which she felt it was useless to stand upon now—to speak openly of such things as had happened, to a man who was neither her husband, her father, nor her brother. And then, her resolution taken, or rather, that importunate inner voice obeyed, she got up, and leaning over the table towards him, said—

‘I want to know if you will help me in a very great trouble?’

‘With every power that I have, I will help you,’ he replied, unhesitatingly, and waited to hear what it was that he had to do.

‘Since I came in I have heard of a thing that has happened. I hardly know how to tell you of it. It makes me feel as if I had been laughing and amusing myself in some room, underneath which another person was being tortured to death.’

Her lips were parched; her eyes dilated.

‘If I did not trust you entirely,’ she said, as if she appealed to him, ‘I could not tell you.’

For a moment she was silent, while Michael waited, and then, turning to him again, told him, unfalteringly, of the discovery she had made, and repeated, word for word, the conversation between herself and Ada. Michael listened in perfect silence; it was, he felt, the only way in which to hear such a tale.

‘I have sent her home,’ Eleanor said at last, ‘that I might try to think. She is safe for to-night, since she says her mother is away, and her father will not return before eleven to-morrow. I have told her to come here early—at nine to-morrow morning. I thought I would keep her here till her parents knew. I think her father has a heart, but I cannot endure that woman, her mother. I feel that she would rail at her—not because she had done wrong, but because she had failed in getting married to Otho.’

He nodded.

‘Do you think I have done right?’

‘Perfectly right. There was nothing else to be done. Do you know where—he—is?’

He spoke as if he found a difficulty in finding a term by which to speak of Otho.

‘No, I do not; but your—Mr. Langstroth knows all about him. He gave me his address at Christmas, and I have kept it. It is through him we shall have to send.... It is now clear to me why Otho would not give his address to Magdalen.’

‘I see. The thing is, suppose he does not choose to answer the summons—your brother, I mean. You say she said she had written to him?’

‘A hundred times, she said, and received no answer.’

‘That looks very much as if he had chosen to desert her entirely, and did not intend to notice any demand. I fear he will not come if we send for him.’

‘I do not know that. I think he may. I have an idea in my mind. I will tell you why I have it, afterwards. Since you told me what his besetting sin was, I have watched him carefully. He does what he feels inclined to do, and leaves the results to chance. I have seen it in a thousand things, great and small. I can tell no reason why he should have committed this crime—his heart is black—I do not understand such things. But I believe that when last he saw the girl, he did not know of this, and that he was tired of the caprice, and afraid that her letters might tell him of some such thing; so he has never read them, but trusted to his god, chance, that they did not tell him what he did not want to hear. I saw him burn a thing one day, without opening it. Your brother asked him why he did that, when he knew it was a bill he would have to pay. He said he knew nothing till he had read it.’

She also told him of the episode she had seen between Otho and the young woman who had been singing.

‘The expression on his face was fear,’ she went on, as coolly as she could. ‘I did not understand it then. Now I do. It was dusk. He could not see the figure properly; he feared to meet Ada; he thought for a moment that it was Ada, come to accuse him of his sin. All the time he was here he must have been haunted by the fear that she might confront him. His questions to us about her, were for a blind; and I think he wanted to get some news of her, without seeming to seek it. As we told him nothing, he chose to behave as if there were nothing to tell. This has all come into my mind since I have seen Ada. Perhaps I am wrong; but if I am right—and I believe I am, and we send a message to Mr. Gilbert Langstroth, Otho will know what it means, and will come.’

‘Could Gilbert have known?’

‘No, no, no!’ she exclaimed, vehemently. ‘I will stake my life on it that he did not.’

‘I think your theory may be quite right, up to a certain point. You may be right as to the past, that is, for that would be quite consistent with his character. But I doubt your sanguine anticipations being correct. I doubt his coming, if we send for him. Suppose he is out of England, and refuses to come; because it would be so much easier for him just to leave her to you, or to herself, or to her fate.’

‘There is some little time yet. If he does not answer, I will go to him where he is, and make him come. I will so speak to him that he shall not dare do anything but come. I will die, but I will force him to make what miserable reparation lies with him. He is poor now,’ she added, with a peculiar smile, such as Michael had never seen upon her face before. ‘Before very long, he will be a pauper. I know it. He will be dependent upon me. I have understood that for some little time past. But if he does not come home and marry Ada, I will let him die of hunger in the street, rather than give him a penny.’

She did not speak noisily nor vehemently, but Michael saw that she was quite prepared to carry out her words.

‘Then you have a strong hold upon him,’ he said. ‘Now, what we have to do, is to telegraph to Gilbert. We can, of course, have an answer from him to-morrow. By the way, it cannot go before to-morrow. Then we shall know better what to do. If you will give me pen and paper, we can perhaps agree together what to say.’

Eleanor brought the writing things, and after various false attempts, they decided to send:—

‘Send O. A. here instantly, on a matter of life and death. Not an hour to be lost. If he is not near, send information how he is soonest to be found.’

‘I will see that it goes first thing in the morning,’ said he. ‘And you say Ada is coming to you?’

‘Yes; at nine.’

‘That is well. She could not be in a better place. Do not leave your house yourself. I will see Mr. Dixon. There is no necessity for you to trouble. Try to make her talk to you about it; do you understand? It will be better for her than anything. It may save her life and her reason.’

‘Yes, I will do so. Do you think I should send for her here to-night?’

‘No, I do not. It would excite the curiosity and suspicion of your own servants, and the tale would be over the whole village long before morning. I shall be obliged to tell them over the way, though,’ he added, ‘because it might be just possible that Gilbert’s reply might make it necessary for some one to go up to town, to settle things more expeditiously. I might go up alone; or if you went, I would go with you—if I may.’

‘If you may!’ she repeated, in a faltering voice, ‘What could I have done without you!’

‘Another time,’ said he, looking straight into her eyes, ‘I will tell you something. We have other things to think about now. Be as tranquil as you can, and remember that you could have done nothing but what you have done.’

He wrung her hand without saying anything more, and left her.

They had searched their hearts to find what was the best to do in this terrible emergency, and being at one on the point they did it. The time in which to decide was short, and they did not know the whole extent of the woe about which they were, as it were, legislating. Perhaps they tacitly agreed that the nature which had endured so long could endure till to-morrow morning. They knew not what were the principal factors in the sum of the events, in the midst of which they found themselves without a moment’s warning. Those factors were despair, and the promptings of a heart which had literally had all life and all reason ground out of it by seven months of perfect wretchedness.

Eleanor slept little that night, and waited with sickening anxiety for nine o’clock. It came, but brought not Ada with it. Half-past nine; yea, ten had struck, and she came not. Thrilling with uneasiness, Eleanor knew not what to do. She feared by making inquiries to excite suspicion. Unhappy and uncertain, she waited till about half-past ten. Michael called, and, without sitting down, just told her not to make herself more uneasy than was necessary, but that he had been at Mr. Dixon’s, intending to appoint a meeting with him on his return. His assistant said he had had a letter from him, deferring his return till the following day, and that the maid had told him that Miss Dixon had gone out, and up the town, without waiting for any breakfast.

Eleanor felt her heart in her mouth.

‘Has she gone out to kill herself?’ she whispered.1

‘I do not think so,’ said Michael. ‘She cannot have wandered very far. You shall have news as soon as I can send it. There is only one road out of this end of the town, and I am riding that way. Good morning.’

So she was left alone, with the conviction that Michael himself was far more disturbed than he chose to tell her. Fears and terrors loomed up like giant shadows in the background of her mind, and so she passed the most terrible day of her life.